Salon.com Article

Stevie Nicks
She's cool, she's hot and she's back. The witchy '70s glam princess, who was Lilith Fair before there was one, is in style -- again.

By Joyce Millman

June 5, 2001 | It's 1977 and Fleetwood Mac is the biggest Mac in the world. The band's "Rumours" album has been No. 1 on the American charts for 31 weeks. Stevie Nicks' husky baby voice, all velvet and helium, pours forth from every turntable and car window in the land: "Thunder only happens when it's raining/Players only lo-ove you when they're playing." You can't escape "Rumours." After a while, you don't even try. You simply lie down in the tall grass and let it do its stuff.

Nicks is one of Fleetwood Mac's three singer-songwriters -- keyboardist Christine McVie and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham are the others. But onstage (and Fleetwood Mac is touring incessantly), Nicks is front and center, tiny and snub-nosed and as fresh-faced as a cheerleader, twirling in her ballerina skirts and gauzy batwing blouses and lacy shawls and Bride of Frankenstein platform boots. She's the photogenic one, and the media gloms onto her, which isn't fair, really, because Fleetwood Mac is much more than Stevie Nicks' backup group.

Drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie, the band's namesakes, are one of the most supple, crackling rhythm sections in rock 'n' roll; they've anchored Fleetwood Mac through years of personnel changes, and now they've made their big, unimaginably big, score. The latest incarnation of Fleetwood Mac has a luscious sound merging the smoky blues favored by Christine McVie with the American pop-folkie confessionalism of Buckingham and Nicks, two kids from affluent San Francisco suburbs who played in a local band together, ran away to Los Angeles, became lovers and recorded one unsuccessful album as a duo. The album nonetheless caught the ear of Mick Fleetwood, and they joined the band in 1974.

In Fleetwood Mac, Christine and Stevie are like the Dashwood sisters in Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility," although not in the way you'd assume. McVie is an accomplished, respected musician. Her singing is self-possessed and serene. But she's the one writing vulnerable lyrics like "You can take me to paradise/But then again you can be cold as ice/I'm over my head/And it sure feels nice," and "Oh Daddy ... I'm so weak but you're so strong." Nicks has the flighty, passionate image of a girly-girl pirouetting in a fairyland of crystal visions ("Dreams") and snow-covered hills ("Landslide"); onstage, she pulls her velvet cloak around her and becomes "Rhiannon," the sensuous witch who "rings like a bell through the night" and "rules her life like a bird in flight." But her love songs are tough and clear-eyed and almost always about the ends of affairs. She does the leaving, and the getting even. She does not beg. McVie and Nicks are a beguiling contrast, and between them stands the intriguing, intense Buckingham, half tempestuous rock stud, half needy little boy. This is a band.

But as great a band as Fleetwood Mac is, it's the romantic entanglements of its members -- during the recording of "Rumours," Nicks and Buckingham were breaking up, and so were the McVies -- that got them on the cover of Rolling Stone, all in one big bed together. And you have to admit, the Nicks-Buckingham oil-and-water coupling, chronicled in the songs they wrote to and about (but, oddly, never with) each other, is in itself worth the price of admission.

Their split is captured in the greatest he said/she said single of all time, "Go Your Own Way"/"Silver Springs," released in 1976. "Tell me why/Everything turned around/Packing up/Shacking up is all you wanna do," Buckingham writes, rather ungallantly, in the fevered "Go Your Own Way." In "Silver Springs" (which was left off "Rumours"), Nicks hits him with a spine-tingling curse: "I'll follow you down till the sound of my voice will haunt you/You'll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you." (Twenty years later, Stevie will sing that song in Fleetwood Mac's MTV reunion special, her calm, level gaze fixed unwaveringly on Lindsey. Chain, keep us together.)

Yes, it's 1977, and Stevie Nicks (born Stephanie Lynn Nicks, in Phoenix) is the most popular, most visible, woman in rock. And she's a joke. Rock critics (East Coast, male) call her an airhead, a fluffball. "Stevie is a California girl prone to writing songs about witches, mysticism and all the other shit one would conjure up sauteeing in a Jacuzzi ... But although Big Mac's sound has been consistently bland, you can't blame Stevie -- she's tried to provide some comic relief," goes one review from Creem. But punk is coming and it's gunning for mega-ultra-supergroups like Fleetwood Mac. A new generation of women rockers will rise and they will play unpretty, untwirly music. Nicks' reign will soon be over. In the future, she and Fleetwood Mac will be a footnote, a footprint frozen in the tar pits of the bloated corporate rock age.

And coffee will never cost $3.50 a cup, LPs are here to stay and California will never, ever run out of electricity.

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